Operating Some of Michigan's Best Public Schools is Not A Crime

Politician would make it one, while genuine crooks really were ripping-off schools not far away

A Democratic politician went to extreme lengths recently to express her party’s opposition to public charter schools, whose boards sometimes contract with for-profit education management companies to operate their schools.

State Rep. Kristy Pagan, D-Canton, offered an amendment to the 2017-18 state education budget that would have made it a crime for a for-profit charter management company to operate a charter school.

Pagan’s amendment would have defined the act of a charter school contracting with a private management firm as “educational profiteering,” and a form of embezzlement under the state criminal code. The amendment failed by a voice vote on May 2.

ForTheRecord: Providing students with some of the best public schools in the state is not a crime.

Crimes are committed in Michigan schools, however, including some recent ones just 30 miles from Pagan’s House district.

Criminal charges were filed against 13 high-ranking Detroit Public Schools officials for an illegal bribery and kickback scheme in March 2016. One of the 13, 12 entered into plea bargain deals; a jury found the 13th guilty of conspiracy and bribery charges.

In April 2012, Highland Park Schools board member Robert Davis was indicted on charges of theft. Davis submitted false invoices totaling $446,000, according to the now-defunct district. Davis entered into a plea agreement and served a sentence in a federal prison.

By some definitions, the Michigan Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, may be said to have engaged in educational profiteering in the pension-spiking deals arranged for its past three presidents.

At least four MEA officials parlayed their status as former school employees “on leave” at the union into six-figure government pensions that are based on their six-figure salaries as union presidents, not their lower salaries as school employees. For example, outgoing MEA President Steve Cook was able to translate his $212,649 union salary into an estimated $115,871 a year boost in his state pension.

Me Here....I am not going to condemn all public schools. Some though have degenerated in ultra left wing indoctrination centers. These schools are failing our children. Indoctrination is not education.

We should be using schools that are doing education as models for those that are failing. Yet the Democrats want the successful schools closed if they are not union run indoctrination centers.

It is also about being able to skim tax payer money via union dues into the Democrat Party. Isn't always about money? It seems to be.

We need a repeal and replace with our education system from the earliest year through college and university. We owe it to the children to teach them American values and how to think. Indoctrinating them hurts the entire nation. We are seeing this in so many places where "students" and "teachers" are afraid of anything conservative. This had led both to break laws to censor conservative speakers. What are they so afraid of.....the truth?

The simple fact is these antifas are today the real fascists. Of they knew history, they would know that simple fact.